Generally, personal computers (PCs) such as personal computer/advanced technology (PC/AT) machines, as well as other types of PCs, are equipped with a BIOS for controlling peripherals such as a hard disk drive (HDD), a keyboard, a mouse, and a modem. The PC has an operating system (OS) installed thereon and may include various application programs which are executed under the control of the OS.
For transmitting information or data from an application program to the BIOS on a PC, there exist methods in which the application program stores data once into a main memory or an external storage such as an HDD and the BIOS reads the data on startup.
Although a single-task OS (such as a disk operating system (DOS)) environment allows such a direct access from the application program to the main memory, it is simply impractical to make direct memory access available to an application in a multi-task OS environment. This is because the OS would need to be provided with complicated functions such as a system call instruction or an application program interface (API).
In addition, the BIOS cannot practically gain direct access to the external storage in such an environment. In order to do so, it would be necessary to generate a huge amount of preparation programs in the BIOS so as to make file formats specified by the OS readable.
Therefore, what is needed in the art is a PC system and method allowing data to be easily passed directly from an application program to the BIOS, even in a multi-tasking OS environment.